Thursday, April 20, 2017

Journalism Is Not a Profession or a Trade...

"It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits -- a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”

4 comments:

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

"Which is more or less true. For the most part, they are dirty little animals with huge brains and no pulse."-- HST, San Francisco Examiner piece, 4 November 1985

I think he realized his creative gonzo journalism was being overwhelmed by the new media and it was one reason he offed himself.

I can actually see that. A somewhat more extreme version of the impulse that led Tom Lehrer to quit writing satirical songs and Charlie Brooker to abandon TV Go Home (although in the latter case, it didn't stop him writing that Black Mirror episode that eerily prefigured the Bae of Pigs).